SPEECH 



0,^ 



HON. J; R. TYSON, OF PENNSYLVANIA, 



ON 



THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAWS AND COMPROMISE MEASURES OF 1850r. 



DELIVERED 



IN THE HOUSE OP REPRESENTATIVES, PERRITARY 28, 1857. 






^^ U.S.A. 



WASHINGTON: 

PRINTED AT THE OFFICE OF THE CONGRESSIONAL GLOBE. 

1857. 



i... 



£>.// E433 

-rA T*^.! 



THE SLAVERY COMPROMISE LAWS. 



Mr. TYSON said: 

It would seem that the English phrase " to get 
the eye of the Speaker, "has little or no meaning 
in its application to Congress in this Hall. The 
stentorian effort and the vehement gesture which 
are usually resorted to, but which I have declined 
to make to obtain the floor, show that the ear as 
well as the eye must be violently assailed. But 
after many unsuccessful attempts, I avail myself 
of the opportunity now accorded to me to proceed 
at once to the subject which I propose to con- 
sider, and about which I have somewhat to say, 
perhaps hardly compressible within the compass 
of an hour's speech. 

My topic is not chosen with any relation to 
party politics. It addresses itself to the sober 
sense and enlightened patriotism of all good cit- 
izens, without regard to political divisions. I 
have selected it for the purpose of bringing into 
prominent notice some considerations which have 
been too long overlooked, the pondering of which 
in the public mind may tend to allay the feuds 
and estrangements of party warfare, and to bring 
back into the ample fold of a common nationality 
those who have strayed into the dark recesses and 
wilderness by-paths of sectional error. I shall 
not imitate those jentlemen who have spoken on 
both sides of the House, in favor of and against 
the President's message. While the study of all 
seems to be to make the party lines on this subject 
broader and deeper than before, it will be mine to 
obliterate them altogether. The ancients were of 
opinion that the offering of the olive branch by 
Minerva was more acceptable and beneficial to 
mankind, as the emblem of peace, than the sym- 



bol of war, which was presented by a martial and 
more powerful deity. 

The present seems to be an opportune period 
to address dispassionate thoughts to the nation, 
in order to induce that calm and reflecting spirit 
so important to the perception and appreciation 
of truth. The Administration of the country will 
soon be placed in the hands of a gentleman whose 
political adversaries cannot deny to him the qual- 
ifications of matured experience and tried states- 
manship, of cool prudence and ardent patriotism, 
and uniting, in an eminent degree, benevolence 
of heart with purity of character, and habitual 
forecast with high intellectual capacity. Recent 
events have shown what vast good can be done by 
the wise counsels of one man, like the Chief Ma- 
gistrate elect, in the administrative concerns of a 
country. Kansas may now breathe in peace, and 
decide her own questions in her own way, with- 
out fear of molestation from within, or of intrusion 
from without. The popular disturbances in that 
unhappy Territory are practically, and I trust 
finally, at rest, thanks to the vigor and prudence 
of Governor Geary, and his present able judicial 
assistant. 

A late vote in this House has proved to the 
world that the moral sentiments of the national 
Legislature are in harmony with the general voice 
of the people against any countenance to, or revival 
of, the African slave trade. One subject, there- 
fore, only remains which can minister to popular 
disaffection, and prevent the restoration of peace, 
tranquillity, and kindness throughout our wide- 
spread land. I refer to a repugnance in the non- 
slaveholding States to the honest, faithful, and 



patriotic enforcement of the fugitive slave laws. 
On this delicate subject I propose to speak the 
sentiments I have long entertained, the result of 
no little anxious meditation, but with absolute 
freedom, and without equivocation or reserve. 
If, after a full hearing, my opinions should be 
regarded as erroneous, or the reasons adduced too 
lame to support them, I hope that the mistake, if 
indeed mistake be possible on this subject, will at 
least be regarded as honest and sincere. Pene- 
trated with the truth and conscious of the integrity 
of the views I espouse, I commit myself to the | 
reflecting and discerning North, and to the en- 1 
lightened and patriotic tribunal of public opinion ' 
in other parts of the country. 

I do not intend to become on this occasion, and i 
I trust on no occasion, the champion of any party | 
on a grave question of common and momentous 
concern. It would indeed be a happy circum- 
stance, if partisans of all distinctions would strive 
to keep from the vortex of party excitement, from 
the cauldron of party strife, the question of hered- 
itary labor and service, 'a system which existed 
by law in all the colonies of this country from 
nearly its earliest settlement; a system which has 
been continued at the South, one to which the 
habits of large districts have been conformed, and 
under which vast interests have been growing up 
for more than two centuries. The continuance 
of this system, and the repose of the communities 
in which it retains a footing, should not be dis- 
turbed by the external agency of ignorant, rash, 
or hostile intermeddlers. It is not merely iden- 
tified with the habits and interests of millions of 
people and millions of property, but it is inter- 
twined with their social feelings, and even their 
religious instincts. 

It is asserted, I am aware, by the great body of 
the northern people, that they have never sought 
to interfere with African slavery, as it prevails 
in the southern States; that though they disap- 
prove of it as a relation, socially and politically, 
and believe that its prevalence nourishes senti- 
ments, maxims, and interests which are irrecon- 
cilably at war with the highest ftciings and best 
interests of the free States; yet, as they allege, 
tliey oppose only its extension into territory now 
free. This, I believe, is the honest opinion and 
the feeling of almost the entire North. 

The few persons who would kindle a servile 
war in the southern States, or excite the slaves to 
acts of disobedience or disloyalty, are those few 
misguided people who are influenced bv the Brit- 



ish press and the orators of Exeter Hall, or who, 
crazed by the intensity of one engrossing idea, 
are to be regarded as insane, and who ought to be 
subjected to the moral treatment of lunatic asy- 
lums. This last class is so exceedingly small that 
they could easily be thus accommodated , without 
much increase in the size of the present buildings, 
or the number of their apartments. 

The allegation of the North is, that they seek 
only to prevent the introduction of slavery into 
the Territories, as the common domain of the 
United States, and attempt to go no further. The 
assertion of the South is, that the question of 
extension is one of local jurisdiction only, de- 
terminable by the people to be affected by it, and 
that they bow to that decision, whether the decis- 
ion be for its admission or exclusion. Now the 
question may be seriously asked, whether either 
of these positions is exactly in accordance with 
the facts .' Do the North confine their efforts to 
territorial questions, and are the South so indif- 
ferent as not to attempt by intimidation and vio- 
lence, to/orce its expansion? Do not the disgrace- 
ful scenes of Kansas, after due abatement has been 
made for all the exaggerations and distortions of 
an excited and a mendacious party press, deprive 
the South of such a plea? The disobedience to 
fugitive slave laws, on the part of whole commu- 
nities in the North, the enactments of States to 
restrict and paralyze them, and the popular clamor 
which opposes their execution, show that a large 
portion of what is called even the conservative 
North do not confine their opposition to slave 
labor in the common domain of the United States, 
I call upon the North and the South to return 
to the compromise measures of 1850, as the prin- 
ciples of these measures must constitute the bul- 
warks of our national Union and national safety. 
Such men as Henry Clay and Daniel Webster 
lent all the resources of their great minds and 
commanding influence to the task of maturing 
them. All parlies are formally and solemnly 
pledged to their observance. They were con- 
demned only by those who were led astray by 
the unpatriotic ideas which English statesmen, 
through a gifted but honest instrumentality, had 
contrived ingeniously to work into the very 
framework of social life in England, and to trans- 
fer to this country the same poisonous spirit. 
Peace and tranquillity were restored. All parties 
became satisfied, except an insignificant number 
at the North, who were obliged by the common 
voice to murmur their acquiescence. 



These compromise measures o/1850 adopted, in 
brief, a few plain principles which were practically 
applied. They destroyed the traffic of buying and 
selling slaves in the District of Columbia. They 
provided for the reclamation of fugitives, and 
fortified the provision by all the guards which 
experience had taught and forecast suggested. 
They gave to Utah and New Mexico the right to 
make their own laws in their own ways, subject 
only to the approval of Congress; and declared that 
each Territory had the right to be admitted as a 
State, with or without slavery, according to the 
decision of the people of each respectively. 

The Kansas-Nebraska act of 1854 is already 
passing away, and will soon be forgotten, or if 
recurred to, its enactments will be remembered 
only to be avoided in all future time. It is alleged 
to have been necessary to carry out and harmonize 
the legislation of 1850. In order to ascertain how 
far this ascription may be well or ill-founded, it 
is necessary to keep in view the fundamental 
principles of both enactments. The legislation of 
1850 invests New Mexico and Utah with the full 
and unrestricted right of local legislation, and, 
like every act from the year 1787, it requires that 
the territorial laws, when passed, shall be submitted 
to Congress for its approval or rejection. The 
Kansas-Nebraska act proclaims the doctrine of 
congressional /ion-tn«eri'enHcin in territorial affairs, 
and gives to the two Territories it ordained all the 
powers of States, while it provides for a Delegate 
in each, and permits them to retain the territorial 
privilege of being maintained at the expense of the 
General Government. By means of such a new- 
fangled and dangerous system of territorial ar- 
rangement, any abuse might be committed under 
the name of law, and Congress could not interfere 
to check or redress the evil. 

The infamous practice of polygamy, as it pre- 
vails in Utah, or any other atrocity, might be 
sanctioned in Kansas or Nebraska, and Congress 
would have no negative upon the act. Every 
statute of the Government relating to Territories 
may be ransacked from the earliest period of its 
history down to the year 1854, and no act will 
be found but this which denies to Congress the 
supervisory power in territorial enactments. Each 
and every other act, from the foundation of the 
Government to the present time, requires the ter- 
ritorial Uiws, when passed, to be transmitted to Con- 
gress. The Kansas-Nebraska act has the unen- 
viable distinction of being a regulation which 
will stand alone on the statute-book, without pre- 



cedent in the past, without having a follower in 
the future. 

Though a departure from all the lessons of 
experience, it is praised for recognizing the fun- 
damental principle of popular sovereignty. But 
how does the system which preceded it— the sys- 
tem which was devised at least by as able and 
experienced statesmen— that under which our new- 
States have been peaceably and wisely settled 

entrench upon the doctrine of local sovereignty, 
or encroach upon the right of local legislation? 
These Territories framed their own enactments, 
and unless plainly violative of some fundamental 
law, were always ratified by Congress.— The 
people never migrate to new Territories until they 
are organized by law. They go from the States 
where, as citizens, they have had a voice in that 
legislation by which, as inhabitants of Territories, 
they are afterwards governed. Why, then, should 
radical theorists insist that the wild, the reckless, 
the busy,— who make the sum of the eariy popu- 
lajjon in those new settlements, — be permitted to 
indulge their vagaries of social novelty, without 
the possibility of amendment, or the chance of 
correction.? That people who, whatever their 
training and previous habits, are unsheltered from 
the weather, and who, to procure subsistence and 
animal conveniences, are obliged to smooth the 
rugged paths of a wilderness life, are ill qualified 
by studious leisure and calm reflection to be the 
founders of empire. And is it just that a parent 
should maintain a child who claims exemption 
from parental restraint, and aspires to the inde- 
pendence and discretion of maturity? But I have 
done with the Kansas-Nebraska act. It is a legal 
anomaly, a kind of legislative discovery of the means 
of introducing discord, bloodshed, and disgrace 
where all might have been peace and fraternal 
kindness. "A political blunder," said Talley- 
rand, "is worse than a crime." The apopthegm 
is just__iji its application to this case, for the blun- 
der of passing this act has been the prolific parent 
of many crimes and sorrows. 

There is no fear that the principle of the act, 
which was discovered for the temporary purpose 
of getting at something else, will ever be applied 
to new territory. Its vitality has already passed 
away. The doctrine of surrendering all the rights 
of Congress to a Territory, with a Delegate to 
represent its people, who are, by the very law 
which created him, wholly independent of the 
body to whom he is sent, is too great an absurd- 
ity for any subsequent act. The notion of con- 



gressional non-intervention, implying absolute 
territorial sovereignty, is a fallacy and a figment. 
It is a caput mortuum, or at best, to remain here- 
after in peiyetual abeyance, to be revived only when 
some other Missouri compromise is to be declared 
inoperative and void. 

In blotting out, then, the discoveries which came 
in with the Kansas-Nebraska act, we come back 
to the compromises of 1850, which hereafter, I 
■ trust, the North and the South will, in pursuance 
of written pledges, concur inviolably to observe. 
They have been wantonly infringed on both sides 
— on the part of southern members, chiefly, by 
doing so unwise, unnecessary, and bootless an 
act as repealing the Missouri compromise, and 
introducing the ghost of squatter sovereignty, 
■when everybody looked for flesh and substance 
as the only plea upon which that repeal could be 
ostensibly justified. On the North, it is contra- 
vened , in attempting to get rid of or evade the laws 
against fugitive slaves. 

I do not charge upon the large class who will 
harborand conceal fugitives from labor, the grE^er 
offenses of inciting them to flight, and resisting 
the law for their restoration. There are few men 
of the northern States who would be thus indif- 
ferent to law, to good citizenship, to moral alle- 
giance, to political justice, to enlightened benev- 
olence. For myself— and I trust in this that I 
represent the sentiment of the law-abiding, vir- 
tuous citizens of the whole great North— if the 
marshal of my district, charged with the duty 
of restoring a fugitive to his owner, were to sum- 
mon me as a part of his posse, either to overcome 
resistance to an attempted arrest, or to prevent a 
rescue and flight, I would at once obey the sum- 
mons. An oflicer commissioned with the execu- 
tion of a writ, or the performance of a duty, rep- 
resents the majesty of the law, and no man's 
house or person is safe if he be not obeyed and 
assisted. The reasoning and thoughtful citizen 
who looks to the law for his own pr^ection, 
would not ask the question , whether the runaway 
sought to be reclaimed was a fugitive from justice 
or a fugitive from labor? These two classes of 
fugitives stand side by side in the Constitution; 
and as the law makes no distinction between them, 
except in the manner of their delivery, so it is not 
the part of a good and law-abiding freeman to 
neutralize or counteract its behests. 

All who honestly look into this question of 
runaway slaves, as a historical proposition, and 
earnestly ponder it as a proposition of enlarged 



charity, must acknowledge that the conduct of 
the North, on this subject, is opposed to good citi- 
zenship, to practical justice, to enlightened and 
Christian benevolence. Inquiry is seldom made 
whether the runaway was well or ill treated by 
the master whose protection he has deserted, or 
about his own capacity to take care of himself. 
Often untaught as children in the knowledge of 
providence and thrift, ignorant of the arts of life 
and the world, these secreted runaways are fre- 
quently doomed to wander about in our large 
cities under the pressure of hopeless destitution, 
temporarily relieved, perhaps, by crime, thence 
to be plunged into the greater miseries of a prison. 
If the statistics of our Census Reports would fol- 
low these pitiable outcasts, sure I am that all con- 
scientious men and women would shrink appalled 
from this ill-considered form of emancipation. 
We glean from the statistics of pauperism and 
crime, a lamentable picture of the degradation and 
ruin of many of these unhappy beings. Shut out 
from the paternal shelter of those upon whom 
they depended for the supply of every necessary 
from childhood — of those whose family bond, 
whose direct interest, and whose legal duty were 
alike enlisted to secure their comfort in youth and 
health, and their maintenance in infancy, age, and 
sickness, they exchange a life, thus free from care 
and want, for one of nominal freedom truly, but 
of real and unmitigated wretchedness. Is it not 
the worst form of immediate emancipation — that 
mad offspring of an insane modern philanthropy? 
Coupled with injustice to the master, and with 
multiplied evils to the existing system of slavery, 
does it not threaten also the social and political 
prospects of the country? Does it not throw 
additional restraints upon those who still are in 
bondage, and postpone indefinitely all consider- 
ation of remedy for grievances in the system 
itself, which, with greater security in the persons 
of the laborers, there would be more inclination 
in the South to regard and apply? Does it not 
inflame and alienate the South, that for the mere 
indulgence of an abstract sentiment, they should 
be deprived of their laborers by their own coun- 
trymen, in a mode not merely unjust to themselves 
and their dependants, but involving disloyalty to 
the plainest edict of our supreme national law? 

In this country our sympathies are so much 
in favor of abstract freedom that we act as if it 
were the pabulwn or natural food of life, and the 
great panacea of other ills. It has its origin in 
one noble sentimciit of our nature, which, if it 



unduly carry us away, may overshadow and 
blight many other virtues which lean upon it for 
support. I freely admit that liberty is an abstract 
good; but this, like all general abstractions, has 
mar^y practical exceptions. It is a good to those 
who know how to use it, and are capable of 
making it subservient to their happiness. But 
under that nanie, and ostensibly to promote and 
secure it, have been perpetrated some of the 
greatest crimes which have ever afflicted human- 
ity. "Oh, Liberty," saidMadame Roland, as she 
passed the statue of the goddess on her way to 
execution, " what crimes are committed in thy 
name !" In the case under review, the worship- 
ers of Freedom, while falling down at the feet 
of its cold and insensible marble, would interpret 
their deity as favorable to the commission of 
those crimes and excesses which, like the fabled 
Astraja, she came from Heaven to prevent or to 
punish. The demons of France, drunk with the 
human gore they were shedding, madly profaned 
the temple by murdering all the attributes of the 
goddess whom they professed to worship. Our 
worshipers of Freedom seem not merely to do 
this, but evince a disposition, by kindling the ele- 
ments of civil war, to fire a far more beautiful 
and costly temple than that of Ephesus— the tem- 
ple of American freedom itself— that fairest temple 
of human liberty which the long ages of time 
have witnessed, or the great volume of history 
lias yet revealed. 

On what plea is it that a system, the inevitable 
results of which, however unseen by the multi- 
tude, must be plain to thoughtful observers, can 
be deliberately persisted in by sensible men ? The 
friends of freedom profess to be the friends of the 
slave; but instead of uniting, like good citizens, 
in a solemn pledge to the Constitution under 
which they live, and like good men, intent upon 
his happiness, to send him back, intelligent per- 
sons are found willing, on the ground of an in- 
tangible and abstract sentiment, to inflame sec- 
tional feeling, while they do a lasting injury to the 
unconscious object of their exertions. The free 
States, it is said, must be the consecrated soil of 
freedom, and emulate England in the glory of her 
free constitution. As an English poet has de- 
scribed that constitution: 

" Slaves cannot breathe in England ; 
They touch- our country, and their shackles fall." 

But the sentiment is merely poetical, since it is 
fallacious and deceptive. It did poetical injus- 
tice to the country of which it was uttered, for in 



sober prose it is rather ironical than true. It is a 
sentiment transplanted here from a soil in which 
it never took root, except as a hot-bed plant, 
nourished for foreign growth. Let me shbwthc 
sickhness of this foreign flower, the emptiness of 
this foreign notion upon which our people act, 
and the dangers it threatens to the best interests 
and the highest hopes of this country. 

I undertake to exhibit the inconsistent course 
and hollow pretensions of English statesmen in 
a course of action apparently dictated by jealousy 
of the rising power of this country, by the fear 
of England's being displaced in her maritime 
supremacy as ruler of the ocean, and by the ap- 
prehension of a national echpse. In this attempt, 
I would do no injustice to the motives and sensi- 
bilities of the English people at large. No one 
appreciates more highly than I do the noble spirit 
of English freedom in comparison with any other 
part of Europe; the truth of English philosophy; 
the results of English science; the genius of Eng- 
lish literature and art. Nor can there be a doubt 
that the conservative opinions of the British press 
exert a wholesome influence on this country. But 
I protest against the subjection of the minds of 
our people to the influence of the English press in 
its madness on the subject of Jfrican slavery— not 
unhappily as that slavery exists in Africa, butas 
it prevails in this country— and in its sophistical 
reasoning to bolster up British free trade, in its 
application to the circumstances of a new nation 
of boundless undeveloped materials, and the most 
promising undeveloped skill. Its selfish and cal- 
culating logic on these two subjects is intrinsic- 
ally unsound, and eminently dangerous to the 
prospects of a rising Power, whose unity among 
the States which compose it, and whose inde- 
pendence of foreign nations in its industrial pur- 
suits, are essential to its greatness and glory. 
The inflammable material among the English peo- 
ple andf'ourselves, has been set in a blaze against 
our system of domestic slavery by writers and 
speakers whose burning tongues and eloquent 
pens have been directed by the cold, the crafty, 
and the calculating policy of English statesman- 
ship. If the efi'ulgent galaxy of States could 
be dimmed by the fall of a single star from the 
glorious constellation — if by sowing the seeds of 
discord, if by prompting unreasonable exactions 
from the South, and exciting a retaliatory spirit 
in the North — if, in short, in order to break that 
chain, brighter and more valuable than gold, 
which, as a zone, binds all these starry lumina- 



8 



ries together, she could lessen the representative 
greatness of the national flag which waves over 
this Capitol, all the labor, the talent, the money- 
expended would be abundantly repaid. What 
BO likely to accomplish this result as to address 
that instinct of the American heart, the object of 
its idolatry, the idol of its politi,cal affections — 
our love of liberty? The American people cher- 
ish liberty as a positive good for its own sake — as 
a good worthy of all vigilance, even as a deity to 
be devoutly worshiped! But English writers 
mistake our zeal, if they suppose, in offering up 
our devotid^is at the shrine of this deity, we are 
•willing to invoke a more malignant demon than 
despotism itself. 

English writers appeal, in justification of their 
activity, to an event in their own history as 
favoring the absolute sacredness of soil from the 
touch of slavery. They call upon the lovers of 
freedom in this country, in the northern States, 
to redeem our land, and prevent it from being 
polluted by the touch of a slave, and ourselves 
from being defiled by sending back a fugitive to 
his master — to that master from whose claims and 
whose protection he has fled. In the face of all 
these high pretensions, if we look into the history 
of England from an early period to the present 
time, we shall find that it is identified with the 
expansion of the slave-trade, and with the per- ', 
manence of American slavery, and that slaves '' 
eould and did breathe in England when their poet 
wrote. I do not here refer to the existence of un- j 
mitigated serfdom, under the degrading appella- 1 
live of villeinage ingross, which was assuaged and ^ 
modified in many of its features several ages ago, i 
nor to the introduction of slaves into her North : 
American colonies, and its legal maintenance [ 
there by acts of Parliament dov/n almost to the ; 
era of our Independence.' No, sir, I do not now ! 
refer to these, but, in connection with the latter, I 
to the direct participation of Great Britain in that ! 
iniquitous trade, to whose abuse and extension | 
she so largely contributed by admiralty edicts, 
acts of Parliament, and her great mercantile ma- 1 
rine. After enjoying its rich profits for years, ' 
when it ceased to be a lucrative branch of com- 
merce, especially after the loss of her American \ 
colonies, the powerful and nervous ]5ens of Eng- 1 
lish writers aided to render the traffic which had i 
been so diligently fostered, not merely odious,; 
but to denounce it as inhuman and piratical. 1 

In the reign of Elizabeth, and under her protec- 1 
lion, Sir John Hawkins equipped three vessels in 



1562 to Sierra Leone, on the African coast, where 
he obtained, among other merchandise, three hun- 
dred slaves, whom he carried to Hispaniola, and 
disposed of to great advantage. The success of 
this expedition excited the cupidity of the Eng- 
lish Government itself, who, in 1564, equipped a 
fleet of six vessels, and placed them in command 
of Captain Hawkins, the successful commander 
oftheformerenterprise. In 1618, James the First 
granted an exclusive charter to Sir R. Rich, and 
other merchants of London, of the trade to Guinea, 
which was transferred by Charles the First to other 
private adventurers. But it would be tedious to 
trace, through the voluminous pages of English 
history, the many charters to carry on the slave 
trade, which were granted during a century and 
a half, for the benefit not only of merchants, but 
of the gentry, of the nobility, of royal dukes, and 
of even the monarch himself ! Such was the pop- 
ularity of the traffic, and the avidity to mingle in 
its benefits, that in the year 1698 the exclusive 
character of the trade was broken up, and it was 
thrown open to all the subjects of the realm by 
an act of William and Mary, (9 and 10 W. and 
M., cap. 26.) We come next to the grand act 
of 1713, when, by the celebrated Assiento treaty 
with Spain, Great Bntain agreed to svpphj the Span- 
ish colonies with one hundred and forty-four thou- 
sand slaves at the rate of four thousand eight hundred 
a year. In 1739, Parliament voted to private 
traders whose interests were injuriously affect€d 
by the statutes of 9 and 10 William and Mary, 
the sum of £10,000, to sustain their slave factories. 
This sum was annually continued until the year. 
1744, when, owing to the dangers and embarrass- 
ments incident to a war which broke out with 
France and Spain in that year, the grant was 
doubled. In the middle of the eighteenth century 
the African fever was at its height in England, 
for then it was (in the year 1750) that an act was 
passed by Parliament, entitled " An act for ex- 
tending and improving the trade with Africa." 

The interests of English commerce, which con- 
trolled the public mind, resisted all efforts to ar- 
rest it. The colonies of North America, which 
threw off their subjection to England in 1776, 
were loud in their remonstrances and condemna- 
tion. But in defiance of their feelings, and in 
opposition to their interests, the lords of the 
admiralty, and even the King himself, returned 
contemptuous answers of rejection to their re- 
peated petitions. 

The first ship-load of Africans to this country 



9 



was that which went directly from .the coast of 
Guinea to Virginia, in the year 1621. Between 
that year and 1712 — a period httle less than a 
century — the number of slaves imported into the 
northern and southern colonies, now constituting 
the thirteen original States of this Union, was 
more than two hundred thousand. Such were 
the conyictionS of Pennsylvania against the traffic 
that, in the year 1712, her Colonial Assembly, 
during the life of William Penn, passed an act to 
prevent its continuance. Pennsylvania was in- 
continently rebuked by the repeal of this act by 
the Glueen in council. Other colonies petitioned 
for the abolition of the trade, but they were an- 
.swered by a flat refusal. In 1760 South Carolina, 
following the example of Pennsylvania, passed an 
act to prohibit the further importation of slaves 
into her territory; but Great Britain rejected the 
act with indignation, declaring that the slave 
trade was beneficial and necessary to the mother 
country. The colonies were reprimanded, and 
a circular letter was dispatched to all the colonial 
Governors, warning them against a boldness un- 
becoming faithful and obedient colonists, and 
against the commission of an offense which in- 
volved the commercial interests of the realm. 

But passing many intermediate acts with which 
the statute-books of England are replete, I come 
to the year 1774, just two years after the famous 
caseof Somerset was decided, and just two years 
before that independence was declared which put 
an end to these insults and oppressions. In 1774 
various measures were enacted for the regulation 
of slaves in those English colonies which became 
independent in 1776; and in 1774 two bills were 
actually passed by the Assembly of Jamaica to 
restrict the African slave trade in that colony. 
Liverpool and Bristol petitioned against the pro- 
posed restriction in Jamaica, and the Board of 
Trade obediently decided by a Report in favor of 
the English petitioners. The colonists eloquently 
answered the mercenary spirit of the report on 
the grounds of justice and humanity; but the Earl 
of Dartmouth, as president of the board, silenced 
the remonstrants by emphatically declaring: " We 
cannot allow the colonies to check or discourage a 
traffic so beneficial to the nation." 

But while this language was used, and this pol- 
icy adopted, towards the aggrieved and complain- 
ing coloni.«its of England, that same England, two 
years before, was deciding, through her eminent 
Chief Justice, that slavery was so odious that a 
slave could not live on the free soil of Britain ! It 



was in the celebrated case of the negro Somerset, 
decided by Lord Mansfield in 1772, that the doc- 
trine was proclaim^ or repeated, which has so 
intoxicated our people and misled their own. 
Somerset was a slave, brought by his master into 
England from Virginia; and the questioi> was, 
whether his residence in that kingdom dissolved 
the relation in which he had stood to his former 
owner.' The learned and able jurist hesitated 
long, ordered a reargument, and finally decided 
that Somerset was free, for the reasons that sla- 
very was abhorrent to the common law of Eng- 
land, and that man could not in that kingdom be 
the legal subject of property. 1 propose to show 
that this decision was neither more nor less thaa 
the fiat of the individual judge ; that it was pure and 
unmixed jtidicial legislation; and that it is opposed 
to the whole current of English practice, English 
history, and English jurisprudence. But the de- 
cision was made, and the distinguished philanthro- 
pists, among whom Granville Sharp and others 
were active in procuring it, set no bounds to their 
exultations. The eloquence of Curran, in after 
times, made it the theme of one of his proudest 
triumphs in glowing and gorgeous oratory, and 
Cowper canonized it in verse. , But one of the im- 
mediate consequences of this decision was to set 
free in the streets of London about four, hundred 
negro slaves, who, having no owners to support 
them, were thrown upon the care and protection 
of those gentlemen most anxious for the judicial 
liberation of Somerset. From former comfort 
they were plunged into extreme distress, which 
\ drove them in crowds to their patron, the eele- 
I brated Granville Sharp, who did all that humanity 
I could prompt to relieve their necessities and mit- 
I igate their sufferings. But all was unavailing. 
I They suffered and returned again and again, until 
1 he began to look out for some permanent plan of 
j relief for himself and of refuge for them. He 
finally determined to send them to some spot in 
I Africa, the land of their ancestors, where, with 
j proper implements of husbandry, they could 
i maintain themselves. 

j Through the achievements of the earliest ad- 
I venturer in the slave trade, such a place as Sierra 
Leone had become known to the English people. 
To Sierra Leone, therefore, that first spot on the 
African coast which England had signalized a» 
the scene of her depredations on the continent of 
Africa, Granville Sharp proposed to send these 
four hundred emancipated slaves, as the seeds of 
a future empire. The ship which carried these 



iWXWIWVV'VMMMWMMPkK 



10 



colored emigrants passed out of the Thames 
under convoy of Her Majesty's sloop-xjf-war 
Nautilus, on the 22d of Febriifery, 1787. Of the 
four hundred persons who embarked, nearly all 
perished by famine, disease, and the hostility of 
neighboring tribes. Within two years after the 
embarkation, the parent of those flourishing colo- 
nies which have since gone from this country to 
the African coast, and which are entering into the 
barbarous and heathen interior of the continent, 
there to sow broadcast the seeds of religion, civ- 
ilization and liberty; — within two short years, all 
the hopes of its noble projector were crushed, and 
this fii'st attempt at African colonization was ren- 
dered abortive. But great events, however fortu- 
itous or inevitable their occurrence, though some- 
times marked by disaster in their outset, and 
overwhelmed by miscarriage and calamity, bear 
about them something of the reproductive spirit 
of the fabled Phoenix. The colony has been 
replenished, its welfare has been watched with 
benevolent care, and nourished into newness of 
life with the most assiduous and tender solicitude. 
A flourishing and intelligent colony now renders 
worthy of our thoughtful notice that spot long 
memorable for supplying the first ship-load of 
Africans to an English slaver in the reign of Eliz- 
abeth, and more recently as the place w'here those 
men suffered and died, whose freedom the judicial 
monstrosity of the great Mansfield had secured ! 
The learned Chief Justice made a twofold mis- 
take of historical fact and of legal principle. Is it 
historically true that slavery was so repugnant to 
the English common law as never to have actu- 
ally existed in England ? and is it legally correct, 
that under the English system of jurisprudence, 
rnan could not be the subject of property in that 
kingdom? The degradation o{ villein tenure, dis- 
tinguished as well by the baseness and servility, 
as by the hereditary and unalterable quality of 
the services it exacted, existed in England from 
the earliest times. But what mean the existence 
of African slavery in British colonies, the slaves 
placed there by act of Parliament, the trade pa^rti- 
cipated in by the King and his greatest subjects, and 
sustained and continued by pecuniary largesses 
a\Uhorized by Etiglish law 7 If servitude be abhor- 
rent to the free spirit of the English common law, 
what mean those acts of Parliament to regulate 
and perpetuate it in colonies peopled by English 
subjects, controlled by English charters, and gov- 
erned by English functionaries ? Did not English 
subjects carry to their trans-Atlantic home, in the 



New World, t^e fundamental maxims and distin- 
guishing principles of the English common law .' 
If so, and that common law was irreconcilable 
with human bondage, did they not act in accord- 
ance with its spirit in remonstrating and enacting 
against its increase? And how,jin the face of 
such a pretension, can the English Government 
be defended &nd justified in abrogating those 
colonial laws which looked to the extinction of 
the traffic? In negativing the act of Pennsylva- 
nia of 1712, in rejecting that of South Carolina in 
1760, in dismissing the acts of Jamaica, in 1774? 
The fact, as alleged, is denied by the whole his- 
tory of England abroad, and the settled policy of 
the British empire at home. The reverse is ex- 
emplified, if not in some of her present institu- 
tions, at least in her former system, and in her 
colonial plan from its earliest period to the time 
when the thirteen colonies were separated from 
her dominion. 

The popular mind of England was fully pre- 
pared for African servitude by the immemorial 
existence of villein tenure and service. It is true 
that the law by which property in the off'spring 
of an American slave was transmitted, became 
different from the rule of succession which pre- 
vailed under the common law of the kingdom. 
But the partus sequitur ventrem of the civil law, 
which prevails in the southern States as the rule 
which now regulates the right to descendants, was 
not the original law of this country. One of our 
earliest colonial laws on the subject of slavery, 
which was that of Maryland, in the year 1663, 
enacted that " all children born of any negro or 
other slave shall be slaves, as their /atAers were." 
This rule of inheritance was that of the English 
common law, the maxim being partus sequitwr 
patrem. 

The paternal rule of succession as to oflTspring 
was abolished in Maryland in the year 1699 or 
1700; and in the year 1715 the principle of the 
civil law, was substituted for the ancient doctrine. 
It is enough, however, that, as the maxim of 
the English common law originally governed the 
right ofj servile succession in this country, even 
that argument of English writers is taken away. 
It is apparent, therefore, that the whole system 
of American slavery was not merely of English 
origin, but that its plan was modeled upon that 
of England, the time of succession being altered 
from motives of convenience, arising from the 
looseness of the marriage tie among the barbarous 
descendants of Africa. 



V't- 



11 



The law of Maryland of 1663, which followed 
in the track of the English precept as to the pa- 
ternal line of succession, condemned the offspring 
of a free white woman who intermarried with an 
African slave, to the servile condition of the father. 
This feature of the early legislation of that colony, 
reflects the well-known sentiments of England at 
that early day, and proves the antiquity of the 
opinion now so well ascertained and universal 
among the learned in this country as to the in- 
equality of the two races, and the degenerate 
re«ults of a union between them. 

The dogma of the illustrious Mansfield in that 
famous decision, that the English law did not 
recognize man as the subject of property, was un- 
worthy of his character and fame. In the year 
1689, nearly a century before, that question, so 
far as English law was concerned, had been sol- 
emnly iecidedby tkewhole twelve judges of England. 
At the head of this august array of learning and 
diility, was the eminent Chief Justice Holt. The 
question arose under the Assiento treaty with 
Spain, and was submitted to the judges by order 
of the King in Council. 

The certificate of their unanimous opinion is 
oouched in language alike concise and direct. 
" In pursuance of his Majesty's orders in coun- 
cil, hereunto annexed," say the Judges, '* we do 
humbly certify our opinion that negroes are mer- 
ckandise."* The document is signed by all the 
judges, beginning with Holt, and by Treby and 
Somers, as Attorney and Solicitor General. 

But the fallacy of the idea has been shown, and 
the system of reasoning by which the Somerset 
case is sought to be supported, is ably reviewed 
and demolished by that eminent jurist, Lord 
Stowell, in the year 1827.t 

This acute and accomplished English civilian, 
better known as Sir William Scott, in referring to 
a directly opposite opinion of Lord Hardwicke, 
made in the court of chancery twenty-two years 
before, that is, in 1749, (see State Trials, vol. 22, 
pp. 4, 81,) informs us that " the personal traffic in 
slaves resident in England, had been as public and 
as authorized in London, as in any of our West 
India Islands. Tliey were sold on the Exchange 
and other places of public resort, by parties 

* Vide vol. 2; of Chalmers' Reports of the Opinions of 
EirtQent Lawyers, in colonial cases, &c., pp. 262, 263. 

t See vol. 7, Haggard's Admiralty Reports, page 94. The 
teamed reader is also referred to the case of Commonwealth 
vs. Aves, reported in 16 Pickering's Reports, page 193, in 
which C. J. Shaw, of Massachusetts, contributes to under- 
mine the fabric of Mansfield. 



THEMSELVES RESIDENT IN LoNDOV, and with as 

little reserve as they would have been in any of 
our West India possessions. Such a state of 
things continued, without impeachment, from a 
very early period up to nearly the end of the last 
century." (Haggard's Rep., p. 105.) He ad- 
verts to the different opinions which had been 
pronounced from the earliest introduction of sla- 
very into the English colonies, by judges of high 
authority, and the greatest ability in the kingdom , 
and the suddenness of the conversion of Mans- 
field to a different doctrine. He is reminded of 
what is mentioned by an eminent ancient author, 
that on the announcement o{ the defeat of Poinpey, 
" populus Romanus repente foetus est alius" — tht 
Romans suddenly became quite another people. What 
event in the history of England called up the clas- 
sical reminiscence of the learned judge, which is 
so delicately and plainly hinted at, is more than a 
subject of conjecture. In a subsequent page, he 
goes on to assert, that for the space oT fifty years 
not in one instance had the attention of English 
justice been called to these alleged violations of 
law, of bringing slaves within the jurisdiction of 
England, and allowing them to depart. " Black 
seamen," he says, " have navigated West India 
ships to this island, but we have not heard of 
other Somersets, nor has the public b%n much 
gratified with complaints of their desertion, though 
it is probable that some may have taken, and not 
unfairly, the advantage that was held out to them 
by the law."— p. 112. 

But if, indeed, the air of England be so pure, 
and the soil so free as to kill the demon of sla- 
very as soon as he inhales the one, or his px-ofane 
foot reaches the other, how happened it that 
down to the very period of the emancipation act 
for the British West India colonies, the Chancel- 
lor of England made decrees for sales in London 
of plantations in Jamaica, together with the slaves 
by which they icere worked ? The Lord Chancellor 
ordered, by decree, the sale of two sugar planta- 
tions at Nevis, and one hundred and fifty-iico ne- 
groes thereon, to take place on the lOth January, 
1833, in Southampton Buildings, Chancery Lane, 
London ! The curious may see in a pamphlet on 
the opinion of the French lawyers in the Mau- 
ritius, dated in 1832, and in a note at the end, by 
the translator, the notable particulars of this de- 
cree. But enough. The facts and the law are mis- 
stated in the memorable case of Somerset. It was 
not the law of England before; it has not been 
acted upon or recognized since, as that decision 



12 



is understood in this country^. It stands without 
any prop in any part of the general or judicial 
history of the British empire. In theory, it is 
unsustained by the genius and spirit of English 
jurisprudence, and as a measure of practice it is' 
without precedent and without authority. 

A principle has been deduced from the doctrine 
of the Somerset case, and applied to our own 
•country, which asserts the instant emancipation 
of a slave, who accompanies his owner, so soon 
as he touches a non-slaveholding State, in the act 
of transit to another. Whatever may be the local 
law of any member of this Confederacy, such a 
doctrine is opposed, not merely to fraternal good 
faith and international (not to spe^k of inter- 
Slate) comity, but to the whole spirit of the Fed- 
eral Constitution; while an attempt to enforce so 
baleful a notion would be prolific of the direst 
mischief to the peace and harmony of the different 
States.* 

The law, as declared in that celebrated decision, 
■will, for the future, govern the opinions of Eng- 
lish lawyers, at least so long as it does not come 
in contact with some controlling and predominant 
interest in England. Whenever any such great 
interest shall arise, such, for example, as the im- 
portance of the Cooly trade, then we may expect 
to hear Mbstantial reasons for the reversal of 
Mansfield in the same spirit of his own sudden 
judicial somerset. 

Before quitting this branch of the subject, allow 
me to say that the Cooly trade to which I have 
adverted in the West Indies, as exemphfied since 
the emancipation of African slavery there, is 
shown to be, by its working in Cuba, little else, 
and hardly better, than the African slave trade. 
It has most of its abhorrent features, and must 
end, if indeed the system be not in its origin 
and tendency identified, with African servitude. 
But this subject has been so fully unfolded by 
my honorable friend from North Carolina, [Mr. 
Clivgman,] that 1 forbear to enter further upon 
that field of research. While I commend his 
speech to the perusal of all thoughtful men, and 
think his facts should be pondered by all phi- 
lanthropists, I must say that he has ventured 
some general and particular opinions which he 
cajinot expect me either to subscribe to or ap- 
prove. The luminous development of the same 

*See the National Intelligencer of December 17, 1556, 
and January 4, 1S57, for the fact, that in Prussia, the doc- 
trine derived from the Somerset case is not the law of that 
empire. 



subject by the honorable and learned gentleman 
from Louisiana [Mr. Taylor] should be turned 
to by all inquirers into the spirit and objects of 
this trade. Then what becomes of the value of 
superior British pretensions to human liberty and 
sacredncss of soil ? Is the sentiment worth more 
than this, that the political aims and the commer- 
cial and pecuniary interests of England form the 
basis and groundwork of British benevolence on 
this subject ? Since the modification of pure vil- 
leinage, and the emancipation of African slavery 
in her West India possessions, she has estab- 
Ushed within the island as much liberty for the 
sojourner and subject as is compatible with a 
hereditary peerage and hereditary royalty, always 
saving the distinctive demands of commerce, and 
the other great pursuits of the kingdoiH. But 
whatever motive may have actuated the immedi- 
ate emancipation of her slaves in the West Indies, 
we find the lessened production of these islands 
has given rise to a system bearing only a differ- 
ent name, but having all the objections to which 
African slavery is liable. We find also existing 
in the East Indies a system which, however jus- 
tifiable with reference to the condition of that 
country and the aims of England in securing and 
extending her dominion, is totally at variance 
with the sublimity of her benevolence in all that 
concerns slavery in the United States. 

I am no apologist for slavery in any form. I 
believe it to be opposed to the genius of our Gov- 
ernment and injurious in its effects upon this 
country. But while I deplore its existence, I am 
not insensible to the incontrovertible fact, that the 
African, whether bond or free, has been greatly 
elevated in character, and improved in condition 
and happiness, by his residence among a reli- 
gious, an educated, and a free people. That ser- 
vitude which existed, and now exists in Africa, 
and to which most of the progenitors of the pres- 
•ent race of American slaves were doomed, is an 
unmitigated, a barbarous, and hopeless tyranny — 
that tyranny which is natural to a savage people, 
without Christianity, and without civilization. 
Nor can anyone doubt, who knows aught of the 
slave system which prevailed in the West Indies, 
and of the Cooly system which has been substi- 
tuted under English rule, or which now exists in 
Cuba under the laws of Spain, or even the system 
ofpeonog-e, as that obtains in Mexico — that slavery 
in the southern States is comparable to neither of 
these. The different systems referred to admit 
of more connivance at abuse, and are not more 



13 



favorable to the welfare and comfort of the un- 
happy subjects of them, than the more benignant, 
generous, and in some degree patriarchal, system 
existing in our southern States. Who ever heard 
that slaves in our southern States were over- 
worked, under-fed, ill-clad, or do not have the 
Gospel preached to them? Any one who will 
carefully study the history, the physiology, and 
characteristics of that division of the African 
race which has been brought to this country, can- 
not fail to perceive that no equality of rights with 
the races of Europe would bring about equality 
of condition. Thenaturalinferiority of the negro 
is physically and metaphysically a fact. You 
may make society a level table-land , but you can- 
not prevent the African negro from sinking in 
intellectual stature below the height of the Euro- 
pean. The laws of our free States, which show 
the slow but certain results of experience, attest 
this truth by withholding from the negro more 
than a measured or qualified freedom. As the 
untaught Indians are, for their protection, in a 
state of tutelage to this Government, so the de- 
scendants of Africa, for their security and hap- 
piness as a dependant race, are in a similar 
position in most, if not all, of the different States 
in which they are placed. 

That any system is a bad one which places the 
happiness of one man in the keeping of another, 
without more legal restraint than at present exists 
in the slaveholding States, is certainly a grave 
objection; but this objection would no doubt be 
lessened, if not removed, in a calmer condition 
of the popular elements. All I mean to say is, that 
it is unjust to the character of this country, and 
injurious to the social and moral standing of the 
southern States, to confound the system of hered- 
itary service which exists among them, with a 
condition of law and a state of society out of all 
comparison inferior to theirs in those attributes 
and virtues which form and enter into the compo- 
sition of a religious, a high-toned, and an enlight- 
ened people. England is an exiguous territory, 
situated in the same latitude with some of our 
more northern States. She has no need, from 
climate or soil, of African service any more than 
they, as she proved in 1787, when she sent her 
four hundred black people to Africa. She cannot 
appreciate the want of such labor in a country 
stretching through every variety of climate, from 
almost the frigid zone to the equator. Where the 
white man cannot labor, but where experience 
proves he languishes and dies amid a fervid and 



to him unnatural heat, the black man delights and 
luxuriates. In the same proportion that the fervor 
of a high southern latitude disables the European, 
it is genial to the African negro, who suffers in- 
versely in body and mind as he advances toward 
the North. 

This law of climate has silently proclaimed 
itself, by the events of our own history. When 
the thirteen colonies declared themselves inde- 
pendent of English rule in 1776, slavery existed 
in all. Let Engjand remember, and let those who 
praise the free principles of the English Consti- 
tution not forget, that at the moment of our sep- 
aration, each colony held slaves under the coun- 
tenance and regulation of English law. African 
slavery, therefore, is to be marshaled among the 
assets of our English inheritance. Pennsylvania, 
in the year 1780, first provided by statute for the 
abolition of her domestic slaves. Massachusetts 
followed by judicial construction of her constitu- 
tion in the same year; Connecticut aud Rhode 
Island in 1784, New York in 1799, and several of 
the other States in order. But is it not a fact 
worthy of note — is it not an impressive passage 
in our history, that all the States which have yet 
manumitted their slaves are beyond a certain de- 
gree of north latitude ? That slavery is still con- 
tinued in some States where African labor is not 
indispensable, is undoubtedly true, but the appa- 
rent anomaly is well explained by the activity of 
English and northern fanaticism, in preventing 
the maturity of those wise measures of gradual 
alteration which were deliberately meditated in 
each. 

Then the question arises, what is it the duty of 
those northern States which have abolished their 
respective systems of domestic servitude, or have 
been admitted into the Union as free States, to do 
in the matter of slavery in the southern States? 
Have they anything more to do with it now than 
before their own systems were abolished ? Ought 
they not, in short, to deliver back to their south- 
ern brethren, fugitives from labor and service, as 
the Constitution enjoins, and as they agreed to 
do in becoming parties to that solemn instru- 
ment of Government ? Or should they act upon 
the English dogma, that the soil of the free 
States should instantaneously convert a southern 
slave into a freeman ? I demur to the adoption of 
that, doctrine in these Confederate States, poht- 
,ically and morally, as a man and a citizen, as a 
lawyer and a statesman. I propose to show by 
all the Hghts of history, by every consideration 



14 



of justice, by the principles of national honor and 
of national policy, that we are bound to restore to 
the State and to his master the fugitive who has 
left the protection of both. 

Most of the thirteen colonies, when they all 
had a common head in Great Britain, enacted their 
own systems of laws for the capture and rendition 
of fugitive slaves. These colonial laws were so 
entirely sufficient for the protection of their re- 
spective owners, that the Articles of Confederation 
which followed independence in the year 1778, 
were entirely silent upon the subject. But when 
the Constitution was framed, in 1787, two of the 
States had entered upon the work of enfranchise- 
ment. Pennsylvania, whose early law of 1712 was 
repealed by the Q,ueen in council, was no sooner 
emancipated from the thraldom of political subjec- 
tion to England, than, true to her original princi- 
ples, she passed an act for the gradual abolition of 
African servitude within her borders. This act 
bears date the 1st of March, 1780, while the war 
of the Revolution was still raging, and its result 
still doubtful. But" while she thus prepared for 
future freedom in her own territory, she was true 
to the rights of her sisters on her own soil. It is 
distinctly provided in the eleventh section of this 
first great Abolition Act in the United States, that 
"this act or anything in it contained shall not give 
any relief or shelter to any absconding or runaway 
negro or mulatto slave or servant who has ab- 
■ented himself, or shall absent himself, from his 
or her owner, master, or mistress, residing in any 
other State or country; but such owner, master, 
or mistress shall have like right and aid to de- 
mand, claim, and take away his slave or servant 
as he might have had in case this act had not 
been passed." This enactment, with a provident 
and patriotic sense of justice which reflects upon ! 
the men of that day in Pennsylvania the most i 
distinguished honor, anticipated the requisitions 
of the Constitution. Seven years before that great i 
Federal State paper was framed, and thirteen ■ 
years before the act of Congress of 1793 was 
passed, Pennsylvania was ready by her own vol- 
untary legislation, while abolishing her own sys- 
tem, to do substantial justice to all her sisters. 
This section of her act of 1780 is unrepealed to 
the present day, and enters into her statute-book 
as present and existing law. 

The Constitution of the United States wa« com- 
pleted and adopted by the Convention three 
months after the enactment by Congress of the 
great Ordinance, constituting the Territory north- 



west of the river Ohio. The nearly cotempora- 
neous dates of these two paper3,'throw light upon 
each other in regard to fugitive slaves and to Con- 
gressional power. Both these bodies — the Con- 
gress and the Convention — were sitting in Phil- 
adelphia at the same time in the vicinity of each 
other; and the members, no doubt, in habits of 
daily and hourly intercourse. The Ordinance for 
the Northwest Territory originated with Mr. Jef- 
erson,in the year 1784, in whose handwriting the 
original draft is still preserved in the Department 
of State, in this capital. It was modified and 
enlarged by Mr. Nathan Dane; but the idea of 
excluding slavery from that Territory in all time 
to come, after the year 1800, is to be found in 
Jefferson's original draft. But this bill was re- 
peatedly negatived, and would never have passed 
the Congress of 1787, if Dane had not provided for 
the reclamation of fugitive slaves. He was a 
northern man; and, as the author of a Digest of 
the laws of Massachusetts, was true to their prin- 
ciples and poHcy. All else of his bill, as it passed 
into the celebrated Ordinance, including the pro- 
vision for the rendition of fugitive slaves, was 
derived from the laws of his own noble old Com- 
monwealth. 

In respect to the restoration of fugitives frora 
labor, these laws were consentaneous with the gen- 
eral legislation of the English provinces. At that 
time Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and all the 
other States were bound together by the remem- 
brance of a recent participation in common danger. 
Each, fired by the love of liberty, acted according 
to its own sense of independent duty and interest, 
in extending the blessings of that liberty to, or 
withholding it from, the descendants of Africa. 
But each was just to the others ; all were willing to 
yield up those subjects of property which the laws 
of all had once enforced. Whatever may have 
been the sentiments of those States which had 
adopted legislative emancipation, they knew that 
fraternal concord, the sublime hopes of a glorious 
national future, public peace and private atlection, 
political union and social unity, were fur higher 
considerations than merely absft'act sentiment in 
favor of general liberty, however lofty, praise- 
worthy and noble. The power of the English 
press ceased for a time to be felt in this country. 
The system of dividing to conquer had not entered 
into the minds of her ambitious statesmen. The 
interests of England were not entirely divorced 
from the profits of the slave trade. Emissaries 
had not been sent over the Atlantic to poison the 



15 



minds, obscure the vision, and alienate the affec- 
tions of the American people. At that tinne, 
Pennsylvania would not have blurred the fair page 
of her legislation by the act of 1847 which denied 
the use of her prisons to the United States for the 
detention and safe-keeping of negro fugitives from 
labor, seeking concealment within her jurisdic- 
tion. At that time, Massachusetts would not have 
stained the patriotic page of her statute-book with 
the provisions of such an act as the personal-lib- 
~ erty bill — a law which at one blow attempts to 
blot out the Constitution, and to paralyze two 
acts of Congress passed in pursuance of its pro- 
visions. It proclaims disfranchisement of his 
profession to that lawyer who may venture to 
represent a claimant of a fugitive slave under the 
laws of Congress of 1793 or 1850, and in its 
whole scope and tendency is a moral treason 
against the United Slates. If it be enforced, it 
would be declared unconstitutional; and any overt 
act of resistance under it to the Federal authority, 
would be treated and punished as actual treason. 
Thank Heaven the native spirit of Pennsylvania 
was awakened, and her honor redeemed by the 
repeal of her infamous law of 1847; but that of 
Massachusetts, in spite of earnest remonstrances 
and stirring appeals from her greatest sons to the 
patriotism and national allegiance of her people, 
> yet remains untouched upon her statute-book to 

the present day. 

Where is ihe spirit which, in the year 1643, 
bound Massachusetts, New Plymouth, Connec- 
ticut, and New Haven, together as one colony for 
mutual and common protection ? Where sleeps 
the spirit of a wise and provident forecast which 
suggested, in the celebrated Articles of Canfeder- 
ation formed in that year, a provision that any 
servant, running away from his master into any 
of the confederate jurisdictions, should be deliv- 
ered to his master, upon the certificate of a magis- 
trate, or other proof? The personal-liberty bill 
of 1855 ignores the existence of these ancient 
articles, and is oblivious of all existing confeder- 
ations, as well of the duty she owes to " the con- 
federate jurisdictions, "as to herself as one mem- 
ber of a far greater and closer Union. — One of the 
objections made in Massachusetts to the fugitive 
slave laws of 1793 and 1850 is, that they contain 
no provision for a right of trial by jury. If this 
reason were removed, there would still be another, 
as it comes from persons who are opposed to the 
execution of ail fugitive-slave enactments. But, 
in the case of alleged fugitives, there is no ad- 



Tantage, but a manifestimpropriety , in such a form 
of trial. The New England colonies were keenly 
alive, in 1643, to all the forms and principles of 
English freedom which did not intrench upon 
their distinctive theological opinions: but they 
saw nothing in the questions involved in simply 
reclaiming a fugitive from labor, which justified 
or required the interposition of a jury. He was 
to be delivered to his master, according to the 
words of the Articles, " upon certificate from one 
magistrate in the jurisdiction out of which the 
said servant fled, or other pi-oof." This regula- 
tion, and others of a similar nature, were ex- 
pressly made a part of this celebrated compact,- 
for the reason which the convention assigns — that 
of preserving peace, and taking away all occa- 
sions of strife among the parties composing it. 
Happy would it be for the honor and repose of 
the country, if these communities would heed the 
lessons of their own history, and adopt the senti- 
ments and examples of their ancestors, in their 
present policy and laws, while acting on a grander 
and wider theater ! 

But before the Personal Liberty Bill of Massa- 
chusetts was passed, various other States enacted 
laws within their several jurisdictions, for the 
purpose of crippling and disabling the act of 1793. 
This statute of Congress was one of the earliest 
measures which the far-seeing men of that day 
deemed necessary to the peace of the country and 
the justice of its citizens. It was passed in the 
administration and received the sanction of Wash- 
ington. It was only to carry out the Constitu- 
tion itself, as an injunction upon States for the 
observance of a common duty which the colonies 
had performed before and during the Confeder- 
ation, which Pennsylvania as a Slate had volun- 
tarily imposed upon her own citizens, and which 
the celebrated Ordinance of 1787, so much and 
justly extolled for its wise and liberkl provisions, 
imposed upon the territory it forever dedicated 
to freedom. 

But State enactments embarrassed the execution 
of the law of 1793, and combinations were mad« 
in the free States with English subjects in Canada, 
to facilitate escapes by what is popularly known 
as Ike underground railioad. Every means was 
devised by rendering fugitives secure from re- 
capture, to multiply the motives to flight. 

The southern men, from loss of their property 
incurred in violation of good faith to our colonial 
and constitutional pledges, and to all the circum- 
stances of our earlier and later history, seemed to 



16 



have become incurably alienated. The hand of 
an enemy had tlirown the apple of discord among 
a large family of happy States which were march- 
ing together, as a band of attached brothers, to 
greatness and to glory. Wise statesmen saw in 
it all the fell mischief of the demon, who aimed in 
undermining the affections of the people to carry 
away the grand palladium of our country. 

I call upon the intelligent North, as a northern 
man, to act as lovers of the Constitution, to act as 
good citizens, to act with a view to the practical 
benefit of their own country rather than yield 
themselves to the sublimated generalities of light- 
headed, giddy, and theoretical sentimentalists at 
home and abroad. No State can interpose ob- 
■tacles to the execution of the fugitive slave law 
within its own jurisdiction, and be. a just and 
faithful member of the Union. Any State which 
passes laws to prevent or impede their execution, 
or which does not, by its legislation, give them 
the moral force of its countenance, and if need 
be, the physical aid of its executive police, has 
fallen from that devoted allegiance which distin- 
guished the early days of the Republic. 

Let us consider this subject with reference to 
the words of the Constitution, providing for th* 
delivery of fugitives from justice, and fugitives 
from labor. These provisions follow each other 
in the second section of the fourth article: 

," A person charged in any State with treason, felony, or 
Other crime, who shall flee from justice and be found in 
another State, shall, on demand of the execulive authority 
of the State frciai wliich he fled, be delivered up, to be 
removed to the State liaving jurisdiction of the crime. No 
person held to service or labor in one State under the laws 
thereof, escaping into another, shall, in conseque;ice of any 
law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service 
or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to 
whom such service or labor may be due." 

The criminal and the slave, one flying from the 
law, and the other escaping from his master, are 
both to be delivered up, the one on demand of the 
executive authority of the State from which he 
fled, and the other on claim of the party to whom 
Buch service or labor may be due. In these pro- 
Tisions, intended to guard against the collisions 
to which the preservation of distinct State rights 
might inevitably lead, it is observable that the 
tlave-dause is distinguished from the other by this 
guarded language, that " 710 law or regulation" in 
Vie Slate to which he has escaped, shall prevent the 
delivery or rendition to his owner. This being 
the supreme law of the whole Republic, that which 
gives us the protection and honor of nationality, 
it can be evaded or disobeyed only at the sacri- 



fice of a fundamental as well as superlative social 
duty. Obedience — implicit, unreserved, and per- 
fect obedience to the Constitution, on these great 
inter-State regulations, is at once the base of our 
social edifice, and the key-stone of the whole na- 
tional pile. 

The two above-quoted provisions, as to crim- 
inals and servants, are in the same category. 
The Legislature of a State in throwing impedi- 
ments to the fair operation of either would, as I 
have intimated, be equally culpable. To put an 
extreme case: — if a State dispensing with capital 
punishments should refuse to deliver or throw 
hindrance in the way of recapturing and deliver- 
ing fugitives from justice in States where certain 
crimes were capitally punished, would not such 
refusal be an infraction of the Constitution .' Some 
States disapprove, in their punitive systems, of 
solitary confinement, and others approve of no 
plan but that which separates ofl!enders. Some 
find imprisonment for a few years abundant for 
all the purposes of retributive justice and perma- 
nent reform, while others shut up their criminals 
for life. Some immure the culprit, if not in a 
dungeon as horrible as the black hole of Cal- 
cutta, in a prison nearly as detestable; while 
other States provide humane places of punish- 
ment. 

Now I ask, if in this diversity of opinion and 
practice, a sentiment should grow up in any of the 
States against the infliction of death or imprison- 
ment for life, or the lash — if, in self-righteous 
benevolence, any State, yielding itself to the 
vagaries of the hour, should come to regard these 
punishments as cruel, and the expiation of an 
ofi'ense by physical suff"ering as unjust or tyran- 
nical — is such an opinion , whether righ t or wrong, 
an admissible excuse, upon any ground consist- 
ent with the safety of society, for refusing to 
deliver up the offender to a State demanding him? 
Would not a law interposing the least barrier to 
the capture, security, and delivery of the criminal 
be justly accounted as criminal itself, and even 
rebellious? Is there any diflference in principle 
between acting in opposition to law upon the idea 
that slavery may be unjust and cruel in its effect 
upon the slave, and opposing a law because cruelty 
towards the criminal is deemed unrighteous and 
forbidden ? In both cases a sickly tenderness 
may plead that " mercy blesses him that givea 
and him that takes." But the great poet himself 
has elsewhere said that " mercy is not itself thai 
, ofllooks so." Mistaken and false mercy is like 



17 



that narrow charity which, in feeling the genial 
warmth of its own fireside, does not realize the 
possibility of shivering darkness beyond; while 
true mercy, like the effulgent sun — broad as its 
light, and warm and diffusive as its heat — vivifies 
and gilds distant objects, as well as nourishes and 
illumines those which are near. In order to secure 
the freedom of a single person, you rivet and 
multiply the fetters on thousands who remain 
behind. You give him nominal freedom, but 
peril, if not blight, his real chances of happiness. 
You perhaps take him from plenty, and the care 
of a considerate protector, whose pecuniary inter- 
ests and domestic ties are bound up in his wel- 
fare, and, it may be, consign him to penury and 
suffering in a land of strangers. 

But you do more than this. You violate the 
majesty of a fundamental principle, and beget a 
spirit of lawless disobedience, the worst of all 
evils in a republic. You give countenance to pre- 
texts, often for temporary and unwise expedients, 
to set aside the restraints as well as the requisitions 
of law. Legislative emancipation in the slave- 
holding States is, through the same instrumen- 
tality, indefinitely postponed. But a permanent 
consequence of all remains behind. Thfe seeds 
of distrust and disaffection are sown between the 
■different States of the Confederacy. State is 
embittered against State, private feeling is alien- 
ated, and that sentiment of a common nationality 
which should be nurtured and cherished as of 
priceless value, is neglected and thrown away 
for an illusory and worthless abstraction. The 
hopes of ihe country, which are identified with 
its affection and peace, and the eyes of mankind, 
which are fixed upon us, will be disappointed. 
If we would cultivate the virtues of those great 
men who wrote the New England articles of 1643; 
of those who passed the abolition act of Pennsyl- 
Tania in 1780; of those who shaped and carried 
the celebrated Ordinance of 1787; if we would 
obey the Constitution of the United States, and 
remember the great and patriotic men by whom it 
was formed ; if we respect the acts and venerate the 
memory of Washington, who signed the fugitive 
slave law of 1793: if we would defend in their 
integrity the measures in which Clay and Web- 
ster and Calhoun concurred in the year 1850; we 
would stay the unfilial and suicidal hand which 
is uplifted to destroy them all. The North have it 
in their power, by abstaining from the mischief of 
such interference, to bring back those noble hearts 
of the South which beat in unison with those of 



the North, in all those measures of patriotism and 
nationality which will make ua a mighty and 
happy people. 

It is impossible to add considerations to influ- 
ence human conduct, if motives such as are here 
presented cannot animate, enlighten, and direct it. 
For the single purpose of giving freedom to a few 
runaways, who are perhaps unfitted for its enjoy- 
ment, we may break down the proudest monu- 
ment of human virtue which was ever reared ; we 
may convulse the land with civil commotions; 
and drench it in fraternal blood. And we may do 
all this at the instance of whom.' Of a nation 
whose whole history is at war with all its pro- 
fessions, and whose theory of domestic govern- 
ment and maxims of foreign policy laugh to scorn 
the very lessons they would teach us. How 
would England have resented any tendency in 
this country to excite the discontents of Ireland, 
or to foment, by word or deed, the spirit of dem- 
agogue agitation and factious insurgency there? 
Let alone, she has commenced a system of grad- 
ual correction, and is proceeding — very tardily, 
it must be admitted — to remove those complaints 
of partiality and misgovernment which, for above 
a century, have formed the staple of Irish litera- 
ture and oratory. 

Let me, in conclusion, cast a hasty glance at 
our expanded country, the permanence of whose 
undivided greatness is threatened alone by a 
misguided benevolence and criminal perversity 
towards fugitive slaves. The political State which 
was formed by a union of the thirteen original 
colonies, was mighty and colossal, even in its 
birth. The boundaries, as fixed with England 
by the treaty of 1783, inclosed an area of eight 
hundred thousand square miles. But now, by 
cessions of territory from Spain, France, and 
Mexico, the national domain — that over which 
the national flag triumphantly waves — has been 
quadrupled in extent. Recent surveys make a 
grand total of nearly three and a third millions 
of square miles. Of the extensive and beautiful 
surface, presenting every variety of soil, stretch- 
ing into every variety of climate, and including 
the richest tracts of the world, not a foot of land 
has been acquired by indirection or conquest. 
The acquisitions have been made, in every case, 
after an open negotiation, and for a fair equiva- 
lent. 

The tonnage of the United States at the com- 
mencement of the present Federal Government, 
amounted to 274,347 tons. In the year 1855 the 



18 



commercial marine of the world was computed to 
be about 15,550,000 tons. Of this vast aggre- 
gate, the tonnage of Europe and Asia was about 
ten millions, of which amount, the half was en- 
joyed by Great Britain alone. Nearly the whole 
residue is the present tonnage of the United 
States, that is, 5,250,000. This immense ma- 
rine amounts to more than one third of the entire 
tonnage of the globe, and exceeds the magnificent 
Bupreniacy of Great Britain herself, the proud 
and peerless mistress of the ocean. Without 
any figure of speech, if we coolly look at the 
figures of arithmetic, we may see in them the 
maritime glory of this country, and calculate that 
greatness to which she is hastening. The com- 
mercial marine of Great Britain has, for the last 
thirty years, increased twenty-eight per cent, in 
every .term of ten years; while that of the Uni- 
ted States in each decade, for the same period, 
has advanced fifty-eight per cent. If we recall 
the state of our commercial navy, as it existed in 
1789, according to the census of the following 
year, and consider the vast augmentation which 
the intervening period of sixty-five years has 
effected, it does not require the gift of prophecy 
to foretell that American tonnage will soon not 
only surpass that of Great Britain and the rest 
of other nations singly, but that it will transcend 
in magnitude the combined maritime fleets of the 
world. 

American imports have swelled in a degree cor- 
responding with this expansion, from $23,000,000 
in 1790, to $315,000,000 in 1856. The annual 
revenue has gone on in a progressive ratio of aug- 
mentation from $10,250,000 at the former period, 
till it reached nearly seventy-four millions of dol- 
lars in the latter. The wonderful and unheard of 
spectacle is presented of a nation having a greater 
revenue than some of her public men, crippled 
by constitutional scruples, knew how to expend ! 
And yet the increasing demands of a gigantic 
commerce, with mighty rivers and an immense 
extent of unimproved sea-coast, stretching in a 
line of nearly twenty-five thousand miles — fresh 
from the hand of benignant nature — require it all, 
and more than such a revenue can supply. 

The exports of the country more fairly express 
the grand resultsofitsproductive industry. From 
020,000,000, which was the sum of American 
exports in the year 1790, these exports have gone 
on increasing to $310,500,000, which they attained 
in the last year. But when we reflect upon the 
amount of domestic constjmption, and the stu- 



pendous schemes of internal improvement which 
the elastic energies and sagacious enterprise of 
our people have set on foot, it is apparent that 
the sum of these exports in no wise represents 
the real resources of the United States. Above 
two thousand patents were issued from the bureau 
of that department, during the last year. More 
than twenty thousand miles of railway arc now 
traversed by passengers and merchandise; the 
electric telegraph is penetrating to the remotest 
settlements of the land; and a magnificent project 
has been conceived of uniting by railroad the 
Atlantic with the Pacific ocean. Is it, then, sur- 
prising that, while the annual exports are num- 
bered by hundreds of millions, the annual pro- 
ducts of the country amount to as many thousands 
of millions? It can be shown, by competent rfata, 
that the industrial pursuitsof the country created 
last year, and contributed to the wealth of the 
world, the sum of $4,500,000,000! This vast 
sum, the product of a single year, it has been 
strikingly and aptly said, is greater, by an eighth, 
than the whole debt of the British kingdom, 
which has been accumulating for more than two 
centuries. 

The population of the United States numbers 
nearly thirty millions of inhabitants, who are gov- 
erned by a Constitution which is regarded'by some 
of the greatest and wisest men of Europe as the 
most perfect political instrument that man, in any 
age or nation, ever conceived or framed. The 
resources and powers referred to, must, in the 
nature of things, give to the United States the 
undisputed rule of empire among the nations of 
the earth. To what are we indebted for this com- 
manding aggregate of national wealth and great- 
ness? Do we not owe it all to the binding force 
of that great constitutional charter which concen- 
trates our powers and resources as a nation — that 
sacred charter which it seems to be the study of 
some of our own people, in treasonable combina- 
tion with certain English philanthropists, to tread 
under foot, to profane and destroy? Shall we 
slight the auspicious designs of Providence in 
regard to this country, and disappoint the hopes 
of freedom over the world ? Shall we endanger 
the progress of republican government? Shall we 
extinguish the brilliant promises of a glorious 
future? 

But whatever eulogy this greatness may be 
worth, a greater glory than all remains behind. 
We may boast of our territory, its imperial ampli- 
tude and its boundless fertility; of our inland seas 



19 



and extended line of coast; of the improvements 
which activity, enterprise, and wealth are impart- 
ing to our industrial pursuits; yet more than all 
these, we have something better to be proud of 
and to cherish. The population of this country 
represents the effects of free institutions and the 
influence of free schools, where the future fathers 
of the State are educated up to the high level of 
self-government. They exhibit that unshackled 
freedom of thought which springs out of repub- 
licanism, and the intelligence and happiness which 
spring out of all. We may be grateful for a 
bounteous soil and a noble country; but a livelier 
gratitude leaps to American lips when we refer to 
native genius and talent, to those useful attain- 
ments and that higher public virtue which our in- 
stitutions secure. 

" Man is the nobler growth our soil supplies, 
And souls are ripened in our western skies." 

In what age, and in what nation, does history 



or tradition speak of, since the dawn of time, 
when the common mind and character mounted 
up, as in this country, to the proper stature of 
humanity? Where is the man among us whose 
childhood has been passed in this country, that 
cannot read for himself the Bible and the Consti- 
tution? Where, it maybe soberly asked, in a 
community of millions, are the religious instincts 
of the masses systematically trained and devel- 
oped — where are popular infelligence and social 
virtue, better cared for — where is diffused an equal 
amount of personal freedom and domestic happi- 
ness ? 

The earth may produce abundantly, and min- 
eral gems may be dug out of her bowels or spar- 
kle in her bodom, but the brightest and most pre- 
cious jewels of our land are the hearts and souls 
of her people — the offspring of that better soil, 
whose high aims and elevated affections are its 
natural and necessary fruit. 



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